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Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2018-08-03

Briefly resurfacing from vacation. Much has happened in the last three weeks. This is a long one: find a nice sunny (or shady) spot to settle down, read, and enjoy.

(Vacation time isn’t over. Updates will remain irregular until the end of August.)

Mojave and iOS 12 are now at beta 5. There may be Photoshop on iPad. Apple had a record quarter (once again) and is the first company to be traded at a market cap of 1 trillion USD. They also cancelled the affiliate program for Apps on iOS and macOS.

About the last topic: I use affiliate links for apps and books in this newsletter and other posts on the weblog. I don’t make much money from them – it adds up to be enough to afford a movie on iTunes every month or so. The affiliate rate for books remains unchanged (for now). Only Apple has the full insight to the numbers involved, but this still seems like a petty move from Apple.

In this time of free services and apps, writing a review or article that convinces someone to part with their money is not easy. If you can pull that off, affiliate links can be a way to earn money from writing (or podcasts, or videos) without filling up your site with obnoxious ads that are not under your control.

Doing so on a scale that the payout is actually worth the effort is incredibly hard. You have to build up a reputation and trustworthiness with your writing (or videos or podcasts). This takes a lot of time and effort. In the end, Apple and the producer (developer, author, etc.) profit from a good review or recommendation. This should have been a win-win-win situation.

Of course, Apple can do what they want and is not and has never been obliged to provide or continue this program. But I am sad that the affiliate program for Apps is going away, as many sites that I enjoy and appreciate will suffer from it. I believe this is a wrong step for the community and eco-system.

If you want to support this newsletter and my weblog (so I can keep buying new movies), buy my books!

In other book- and milestone-related news: This week I sold my 1000th book on the iBooks Store.

A huge “thank you” to everyone who put enough trust in my writing to buy one or more of my books. Even more thanks to those who recommend the books on Slack, conferences, in personal discussion and with reviews on the store. (Seriously, please leave a review!) Writing and publishing continues to be an exhilarating, rewarding and humbling experience.

Otto the Automator: “Automator and AppleScript combine to deliver a macOS Mojave Touch Bar Quick Action for switching the startup disk. A perfect task for automation”

MacAdmins on Twitter

William Smith: “After two days of trying to reformat PDF text and pictures on my #psumac slides to fit all my presenter notes, a simple 2-minute AppleScript fixes my problem. tell application ”Keynote“ to set size of presenter notes of every slide of front document to 18 #voilà”

Nigel Kersten: “It’s been a long time since I last made the NVRAM claw. ⌘ ⌥ O F Never Forget.”

Tim Perfitt: “Ok, so after many tried, this works reliably: power down, then power up. As soon as the apple appears, press control option on left side and shift on right along with power. Keep holding until the machine powers down and a bit more. It then goes into DFU.” (Thread)

Emily St: “Extremely cool macOS information for mega-nerds: If you’re wondering what iCloud Drive is up to in a given moment, a command will tell you all the transactions it’s running: brctl log --wait --shorten Recommend piping that to less because it’s a huge log of output.”

Jordan Morgan: “A fun bit of #macOS development history I stumbled upon today, Apple Tech Note 2034. Essentially it included a bunch of guidelines and tips on macOS development but contained such inflammatory assertions that Apple straight up pulled it down (2033/5 are still there)!” (Thread)